How to enable Spotify accessibility on Mac

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This guide is outdated and may not provide accurate information for current use cases. It is being retained as a recognition of the author's contribution, but it should be regarded as archived.

By Kenya, 16 June, 2015

Hello,

It is about Spotify desktop application on Mac and the steps to make it accessible.

My spotify version is 1.0.6.80 but any version later than 0.9.4 (released in September, 2013) would be fine.

There are two steps to make it happen.

Step 1: Open Terminal.app
Step 2: Type the following line and hit enter:
/Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotify --force-renderer-accessibility&

That's it. If Spotify doesn't launch, please check the path where Spotify is installed.

The contents are basically HTML. The layout is complex but if you already have used the Web version, it may be not so difficult to move around.

Here are some tips when searching:

-Hotkey "Command + L" to jump to the search box. After the search, hit Tab once to jump to the main content where the search results are shown. If you hit Tab twice, you can jump to the player controls.

-Some tables are not interactive with "VO + Shift + down" but you can move around inside the table by using Tab or Up/Down arrow keys.

-Current song title and artist name are shown in the title bar.

Lastly, I know that Spotify is not the only option. There are Deezer, Rdio and Apple music that is coming soon. But it is always good to have more options, isn't it? I hope that you find this information useful.

P.S.
If you find it a bit annoying to launch it from Terminal.app, you can download the launching application from here:
http://www.singer-song-reader.com/VoSpotify.app.zip
I made it using Automator.app. It is basically a shell script to launch Spotify with the option mentioned above.
It just contains the following one line code:
open -a /Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotify --args --force-renderer-accessibility

Thanks.

Tags
Mac Apps
macOS
VoiceOver

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Comments

By Leo on Thursday, April 11, 2019 - 21:16

Please don't get intimidated when I say "Script Editor" nothing fancy here. If you use an apple script with the command provided, it won't launch a Terminal session and you can just run it like any application.

First, Go to applications / utilities and open Script Editor.
Pick New Document, button down on the bottom next to Open.

You'll want to paste in the code I put below here and then save. When the dialog comes up, give it a name, and for the type instead of Script, choose Application from the popup button.
I named mine Accessible Spotify but call it what you will.

Here's the code, just enter it as is:

do shell script "/Applications/Spotify.app/Contents/MacOS/Spotify --force-renderer-accessibility&"

By Raul on Thursday, April 11, 2019 - 21:16

Fortunately the app is quite usable now without the use of any script